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We have a home theater room in the basement, one wall is the foundation and the other three are drywall. The ceiling is a drop ceiling. The room is under the dining room but the bass from the room is fairly loud through the first floor... We were considering adding some type of insulation in the ceiling because we have the drop tiles down to paint them black.
Does anyone have experience in what type if insulation or any alternative to deaden the sound a bit?

Then you are stuck. Bass is the most difficult to contain. Adding mass and de coupling the ceiling from the floor of the room above along with all of the other walls is the only way to do it. And it's not cheap.

The problem is the transmission of the sound by vibrating the ceiling which in turn virbrates the floor turning it into a giant speaker. You have to reduce the vibrating by either adding mass, decoupling, or a combination of both.

The problem is the transmission of the sound by vibrating the ceiling which in turn virbrates the floor turning it into a giant speaker. You have to reduce the vibrating by either adding mass, decoupling, or a combination of both.

Then you are stuck. Bass is the most difficult to contain. Adding mass and de coupling the ceiling from the floor of the room above along with all of the other walls is the only way to do it. And it's not cheap.

The problem is the transmission of the sound by vibrating the ceiling which in turn virbrates the floor turning it into a giant speaker. You have to reduce the vibrating by either adding mass, decoupling, or a combination of both.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 330iPilot

That's in essence what the best solution is. You build a room within a room.

Listen to these guys.

If you really want to isolate sound to that theater room, and have none of it escape to the first floor, you have to follow these suggestions. A drop down ceiling will not be able prevent sound from escaping to the main floor.

In our last house we did double drywall on the ceiling - and I think we did one layer of normal drywall and one layer of soundboard. We also used some pretty dense bluejean insulation. It worked really, really well. Someone could be blasting a movie downstairs, with explosions and everything, and the sound would be coming up through the stairwell, but not through the floor. I'm a big fan of layering different types of materials (ie., normal drywall and soundboard), so that when one material starts resonating, the other material will dampen it because they have different resonant frequencies. When I build speakers, I layer mdf and plywood together with flexible glue to do the same thing.

If you insist on maintaining the drop down ceiling then have you considered removing the acoustic panels and filling the space with sound absorbing insulation from Owens Corning ( or even foam insulation) and then replacing the current tiles with sound deadening tiles? That might help if you don't want to throw up sheet rock.

But honest, sheet rock is the way to go. Everyone always brings up the 'access to utilities' excuse and I did too when I did my basement several years ago. But how often do you need to work on the utilities in the ceiling ? Every 10, 20 years ? Maybe never ? Standard sheetrock is only 10 bucks a sheet. It's not going to kill you if you have to rip it off the ceiling and replace 2,3,4 sheets. The only reason I used ceiling panels is because they were already existing in the basement.